A Duck-billed Platliccation?

Right from day one the Groove lexicon was challenged around what it delivered, what it was and what it was perceived to be. Terms such as operating system virtual office, workspace, application, platform, file sharing... The words went on.

I guess the starting point must have been an economic one - people will not pay for a platform. A platform looks too much like TCP/IP - and should be free, whereas it is well thumbed that people buy applications. From a sales perspective people buy products. And in a competitive marketplace such as collaboration I guess this was an image that both haunted and drove Groove forward.

Having made the decision to go as an application the sales / marketing challenges are then head-on against technical challenges. The platform must be part of the solution. Whatever else you do you must have the platform. The platform contains all the replication and encryption technology.

On top of the platform comes the application, the GUI, the manifestation, the thing people buy. So there are different models for the application. Build a light app with an API, SDK and so on and support a developer community to complete the apps. Or build higher-level development environments such as the Forms sandbox, which is where we are now.

But the core problem with the application is how far do you go? Do you progress a small number of comprehensive tools, or do you spread your resources thinly and try to create a wide range of shallow and possibly incomplete tools.

And all the time you are needing to break new ground with the platform and suddenly you cannot do everything, and the part that always loses out is the application. That, in my opinion must have been and still be the core challenge. The platform.

As many readers will know I spend considerable time supporting people with teething problems on the Support Forums and it was partly because of this effort that we launched our own forums. We are please this becoming a comprehensive, independent and strictly alternative resource for those interested in Groove (end of sales pitch :-))

Essentially the platform is still biting back. I have predicted that GFS spaces will still take some time to resolve. I could easily argue that it will not stabalize until Longhorn. But it is not just the platform. And it is not just the app.

It is the perception. A new person starts to use Groove and finds it seductively easy. Downstream some problems begin to appear and it is very difficult for the user to control their own problems. Part of the challenge here was that an oft-stated goal of Groove is that it should be "easy".

Being easy was translated into very little monitoring, and very little debugging tools or facilities. And any that were supplied were very opaque or only available to the minority. This has in my eyes been one of the biggest failures. It has meant that users of whatever stature have been working blind. That has mean that the positive feedback loop required for a rapid and effective development cycle was left open. Despite many and frequent pleas for ANYTHING that would help Groove advocates help Groove help themselves we were met with nothing in this arena.

So even today the platform is dogged with trivia such as outbound alerts that we have to "take on trust" to have arrived. Even today we are met with cpu and disk problems that turn off new customers.

The perception is that Groove has many very Beverley's & Boston's brighest: a group of people who have an unshakeable self-belief. I just hope that some mediocre people from MS come along and provide some much needed balance.